Rod can pick up the pieces, Mike thought. “Can you make them out of local materials?”
“Yes,” the shuttle’s system replied, “the air motiles could deliver the chemicals to the affected area as a fine mist in a couple of days.”
“Do it.”
“You think that’s the vector?” she said, looking at the pupae. “If so, we could take some of the flowers with attached chrysalises, put them in cold storage, and eradicate the others,” Nadine suggested.
Mike pursed his lips. “We could get out of here, put ourselves in cold sleep, and let the people with the big facilities work the problem and cure us when we wake up.”
Nadine shook her head. “It’s not that simple. We don’t know that the virus in the caterpillars is what does it, or that eradicating it solves the problem. All we’ve got so far is correlation—not proof of cause and effect. We agreed this job was worth doing, worth the risk. Let’s finish it.”
“At the cost of how many more lives?”
One look at her face told him that remark was a mistake. “Sorry,” he said. “Look, one more day. Demonstrate causality if you can, and I’ll try to get something more out of Shanks. Then, if we don’t have a clear path out of this, we get out, OK?”
“I guess,” Nadine conceded.
“Nadine, we’ve had two violent suicides and a third attempt. Half of us are quietly hurting ourselves one way or another and fantasizing about volunteering for the inquisition. We need a cure.”
“Mike… Shanks could be innocent, you know?”
“How? Didn’t he hide for weeks and then try to run when I pressed him? He’s guilty as sin!”
“That could be a natural reaction to being alone for years. And he must have known he’d look guilty. Let’s assume his story is valid for a moment, that it is a mutation. Shanks could just happen to be immune. That’s the nature of human biology: no matter how virulent a substance is to the human body, you’ll always find someone who can take it.”
“That’s too broad for me,” Mike said. “Enough cyanide will kill anyone.”
“ ‘Enough,’ Mike, is the operative word. When it comes to germs, viruses, venom—the level of tolerance can differ dramatically from person to person.”
“In theory, sure. But to believe Shanks happened to be immune out of such a small group of colonists is stretching things. And why didn’t he save a specimen of an imago? He’s a trained biologist. You’d imagine he’d think of that.”
Nadine shrugged. “So we go back to Shanks as a psychopath. Get the psych program to evaluate his sanity—which I would suspect isn’t too good after all those years alone on this planet.” Nadine turned to him from her tiny desk in the Yeager. “I think the effect of the virus is at least partly psychological, too: Skinnerian.”
“Who?”
“B.F. Skinner—a twentieth-century behavioralist. He claimed you could be conditioned to do almost anything with a suitable set of rewards. I think that’s how the virus works—it makes our bodies reward physical trauma with endorphins.” She shrugged. “Maybe there needs to be a place like this, for when people get tired of living forever. It might not be that bad a way to go, would it? I mean we all go sometime, and why not make a joyfully messy splash of it on our own terms, rather than waiting for a rocket engine to fail, or a meteor to come along some year?”
Mike looked at her sharply, but she seemed under control. “I guess,” he said, with forced casualness. “Nadine, I’d hate to see Dena’s whole world marked ‘off limits’ and wasted for decades because we can’t nail down one retrovirus. Can we build a countervirus based on what you have now?”
“Difficult, Mike. That’s very difficult. Even with three of us and all the Cochran’s brains working on it, it’s going to be hard to find; and I can tell you right now, Dr. Bailey doesn’t want anything physical coming from us up to orbit.”
Mike stared at her and laughed ironically. “What’s he afraid of? It feels so great to stick yourself.”
She grabbed his left arm and exposed the underside where he had been sticking pins in it. “I’m going to put everyone on naloxone—it’s an endorphin antagonist, blocks the receptor sites. Trouble is, this will take the edge off everything, and make us more irritable, and vulnerable to depression. You can’t do just one thing. I don’t dare give you too much. Sorry, Mike.”
“No argument. Just don’t make a zombie out of me. And get everyone else in here, too. We don’t want any more of that,” he jerked a thumb toward the auto doc and what was left of the barely living Peterson. “Suppose Shanks did it. He’d know how to undo it, wouldn’t he?”
Nadine shook her head. “I would guess that he wouldn’t, or he would have done so. I would guess that he blundered and doesn’t really know how to undo it, or he would have fourteen years ago. But we could—I think—if he could tell us what to look for among those billions and billions of base pairs.”
Mike stood. “Let’s call it a night, Nadine.”
“That quote about the flowers…”
“What about it?” he asked.
“Is it the ravings of a madman—or a biological saboteur trying to appear like one?”
That night, in his settlement room, Mike reviewed everything their library had on the original survey team. He skimmed tens of thousands of kilobytes of technical data on Shanks and his parents, looking for something.
Carl Shanks, his wife Wendy, and their son Ken had spent an entire year fabricating the Griffith’s World genomes. Carl Shanks kept a personal diary which became an addendum to the team’s official report. Mike read the entire file. Everything seemed normal—no difficulties, no reservations.
Something was missing, he knew. Something right in front of his nose. What kind of mutation? No! The genomes matched the design—there was no mutation, at least not since the final genome was recorded. So it happened before the final genomes were recorded. Shanks had had access.
In a minute, Mike was out his door and down the hall to Shanks room. He overrode the entry control and barged in without warning. Shanks was watching his wall screen.
“Shanks! We need to know what you did with the springtimers, how you did it, and when. I’ll need to record this.”
Shanks froze, and continued to look at the wall. “It wasn’t my fault,” he said. “Mom and Dad did the springtimers. I was just a kid, then.”
Mike tried again. “We tested the pupa. There’s a retrovirus—”
“I’m accidentally immune!” Shanks insisted.
“You ran.”
“You were carrying guns! I thought no one’s going to believe me after all of this: they’ll want revenge! They’ll want to kill me for this. I guess I knew I’d look like a murderer or worse. I was scared, damn near par—par—”
“—Paranoid.” Mike supplied the word. Ironically, the last time he’d heard it was from Nadine, applied, loosely, he hoped, to himself. If your fears come true, he wondered, are you suddenly not paranoid?
“I hadn’t,” Shanks continued, “interacted with a human being for fourteen years. I was—just out of practice, afraid. So I left notes, what I thought were clues, and ran. It seems nuts, but I wasn’t thinking well.”
Mike nodded, anger fading. Let him talk, Mike thought. Maybe he’d work his way into something. “What kept you going all these years if you didn’t expect any rescue?”
For a moment, Shanks acted as if he didn’t understand the question. Then he looked into the middle distance. “Instinct, I think. It’s damn hard to die, unless, inside, you really want to. You keep solving problems, keep eating, keep drinking, keep breathing. You can always die tomorrow.”